An HPD lead paint violation that needs abatement takes 70 days to clear. Most never clear at all.

median from inspection to a filed certification, across the 5,885 Class C cases where an HPD lead paint violation names abatement

See what is open on one building.

Every other kind of lead-based paint violation certifies in a median of 34 days. That answers the question, and it is the smaller half of the story. Across all 77,191 lead paint violations New York City has recorded since August 7, 2023, 20.5% of the Class C ones have ever been certified corrected, and 23.9% have sat open more than a year with nothing filed against them.

Why lead paint violations stay open for years

23.9% of Class C lead paint violations have sat open more than a year with no certification on file. Only 0.9% carry Not Complied With, the status that says a deadline passed without an accepted certification. Those two numbers describe the same buildings and they do not agree.

The status ladder shows where the gap opens. HPD sets Not Complied With after a reinspection confirms the condition is still there, so a case nobody reinspects never reaches it. 3,860 violations are recorded as no access for reinspection. 18,223 sit at NOV Sent Out with no later status at all, meaning the notice went to the owner and nothing was recorded after it. A lead paint violation that is never corrected mostly does not get marked as defied. It stays open.

Every status HPD has recorded against a lead-based paint violation, most common first, out of 77,191. Status names link to the status glossary where a page exists.

What HPD means by lead paint abatement

The 5,885 violations behind the 70-day figure cite sections 27-2056.7 through 27-2056.9 of the Administrative Code, which is the turnover rule: when a unit in a pre-1960 building turns over, the owner must address lead hazards before it is occupied again and certify that it was done. Every one of them is Class C, the class HPD reserves for conditions it treats as immediately hazardous. That is why the abatement slice is slower than the rest. It is not a repair an owner can make and photograph. The work has to be performed by an EPA-certified firm and documented, and the documentation is reviewed separately from the work. The abatement ones also certify less often when they do finish: 17.9% against 20.8%.

How lead paint compares with other HPD violations

Certification rate is the share of a category's Class C violations that have ever been certified corrected. Lead paint ranks 5 of 6 on it, at 20.5%. Vermin and pests sits at 51.4%, more than twice the rate, on a comparable Class C population. An HPD violation for no heat, which carries the same immediately-hazardous class, clears in single-digit days.

Same query behind the certification block on all thirty borough and category pages, summed citywide. Median days is the citywide median, measured over every certified Class C violation in the category. The six categories are independent text matches, not separate buckets: a violation naming both a leak and mold is counted under both, so these rows do not sum to HPD's total.

Why HPD rejects most lead paint certifications

Lead is the only category where HPD records the document review as a status of its own, so the acceptance rate is measurable here and nowhere else on this site. Of 790 lead document submissions, 499 were marked not acceptable against 291 acceptable. That is 63% rejected on the filing, before anything about the underlying work has been judged. A further 6,256 violations sit at Defect Letter Issued, which is HPD telling an owner the submitted certification was insufficient and has to be refiled. For an owner, a rejected filing is not the end of the clock. The violation stays open while it is redone.

Lead paint violations by borough

The Bronx carries 41.4% of New York City's lead paint violations, 31,952 of 77,191. Certification rates do not follow volume. Staten Island has the fewest at 586 and the lowest share ever certified, 13.7%, against 21.8% in Brooklyn.

Each borough's lead paint page carries the same figures alongside its other five categories: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island.

Common questions about HPD lead paint violations

What these numbers do not tell you

They do not say why a case stopped where it did. A violation at NOV Sent Out may have been corrected with no certification ever filed, or not corrected at all, and HPD's data cannot tell the two apart. It carries no inspection findings, no blood lead levels and nothing about who lives in the unit. None of this is legal advice or a check on any one address. If you own or manage a building with a lead paint violation, the correction is filed with HPD directly and the work has to be done by a certified firm. What to do about your own building.

No building and no owner is named on this page. Every figure comes from our copy of HPD's Housing Maintenance Code Violations data on NYC Open Data, inspections from August 7, 2023 through September 27, 2026. How HPD violations get dismissed, status codes decoded, violations by borough, citywide, ViolationScout.